Cracks in the foundation: disrupted epistemic trust as a link between trauma, PTSD and disturbances in self-organization

Traumatic experiences profoundly impact mental and physical health, alongside an individual's trust in their social environment. Disruptions in epistemic trust - the capacity to evaluate and trust socially communicated information - are theorized to increase vulnerability to psychopathology by impairing social learning. This cross-sectional study investigated associations between trauma characteristics and epistemic stance using self-report data from a representative German sample (N = 2 519). We examined relationships among trauma type, age at trauma, epistemic stance, PTSD and cPTSD. Neither trauma type nor timing alone predicted epistemic stance. However, their interaction revealed that early relational trauma demonstrated the strongest association with epistemic disruption. Within epistemic stance, heightened credulity mediated associations between trauma and both PTSD and cPTSD symptoms. These findings align with the hypothesis that the association between trauma exposure and epistemic stance depends on trauma type and timing, with early relational trauma showing the strongest links to epistemic disruption and related psychopathology. This differentiated perspective on trauma characteristics highlights epistemic stance as a potential mechanism that may advance developmental models of psychopathology and future clinical research.